I had a conversation with a few people today who are not from NZ about the NZ Accent...

They could not tell the difference between Deck and Dick (They both sounded the same to most of them) but NZers could tell the difference quite easily. If they then said the words themselves they sounded like what I just had said :-(

Do we all sound like John Key or Lynn of Tawa and just not aware of it?

Live overseas for a while and then come home and see how it sounds. It took me a while to get used to it again after living in Oz for a few years. Ads on the radio and TV shows are particularly noticeable.

No accent is good or bad, it's all relative. Some people are more gifted than others at understanding different accents (although sometimes I think it is more a matter of some people care to try to understand, entitled white people tend to be the worst for being unable to understand others accents).

(actually, now that I think of it, it's probably not so much the white bit, but the entitled bit that makes some people have more trouble understanding others, it only seems like entitled white people are the worst because they make up the majority of obnoxiously entitled people)

LennonNZ: I wonder who did Ben Kingsly NZ Accent Coaching... no body?.. I cringed thru-out the movie.. . It more like a South Africian who lived in Aussie for a while and emigrated to New Zealand but worse.

It is like a weird mash-up of the three. Some sentences sound South African, others Kiwi, and a few words here and there sound Australian.